Explanation: The Moon
is normally seen in subtle shades of grey or yellow.
But small, measurable colour differences
have been greatly exaggerated
to make this telescopic, multicoloured,
moonscape captured during the Moon's full phase.
The different colours are recognized to
correspond to real differences in
the chemical makeup of the lunar surface.
Blue hues reveal
titanium rich
areas while orange and purple colours
show regions relatively poor in titanium and iron.
The familiar
Sea of Tranquility, or Mare Tranquillitatis,
is the blue area in the upper right corner of the frame.
White lines radiate across the orange-hued southern lunar highlands
from 85 kilometre wide ray crater Tycho
at bottom left.
Above it, darker rays from crater Copernicus
extend into the Sea of Rains
(Mare Imbrium)
at the upper left.
Calibrated by
rock samples
from the Apollo missions, similar multicolour
images from spacecraft
have been used to explore
the
Moon's global surface composition.